How to have safe and strong passwords and ways to protect them

Living in the age of technology everything needs passwords. The mail that you access, the social networking sites that you communicate, your debit and credit cards, your cell phones and anything you think of requires password. I know that it is a difficult task to remember all the passwords. Never use the same password for everything, which is going to put you in great trouble. My father who is quite old types all his passwords in an excel sheet and saves it on his desktop. This is unsafe. If someone gets an access to it they have your entire list with them. Finally your identity is robbed and you get to suffer a lot before you fix it. Also never make the mistake of writing your passwords on a piece of paper and pinning them up next to your computer desktop.

A good password is one which is difficult to guess and easy to remember. There are few ways to choose a password. Every password should be more than eight characters. Never ever use your name or birthday to be your password. You can use them with different combinations. May be adding it along with your pets name or favorite song or even celebrities (I think this is a great way to remember the passwords as well). One can also use their favorite books or authors, cartoon characters and the list goes on and on. Just widen your thoughts and choose a password that is easy for you and hard for others to guess. Many programs provide default password. Make sure you change the default password immediately.

If you know any other language apart from English you can use words from them. How about mixed case passwords? I always fancy them. Example: bUNTy09. I get thrilled all the time when I have some different password like this. Whatever might be the combination that you choose make sure to change the password frequently. This is a great way to protect your password. Even if you have a software tech support for your computer change your passwords frequently.

The best method to choose passwords is by making up a sentence related to you. Now take the first letters of every word from your sentence and create a password by adding numbers or punctuation marks to it. It is hard and same time easy for you to remember. Eight characters is the minimum length required for a password as I mentioned earlier. If you can remember, make your password as long as possible. This is hard for the hackers to find out. Use all your creativity when choosing passwords or changing them.

Have any of you had the trouble of forgetting your password? Well I have a number of times. Many websites will ask you to choose a question to verify your identity. Some websites give you the option of creating your own question. Make sure that you don’t create questions in such a way that the answers can be scanned from various social networking sites and blogs. Simple to say do not set passwords the normal way. Try all kinds of combinations and make it as complex as you can. Example: The question is “Where were you born?” I think most of your friends and family members would know the answer to this. If the answer is “New York”, type it as “new2522york” or any other combination that you prefer. These are a few combinations that I know. If any of you knows anything more you can share it with me.

SharonThomas - About Author:Sharon Thomas is a freelance writer and an active blogger. She clearly explains how to use safe and strong passwords even if you have software tech support. She also explains how to choose passwords.